


Canvas

by Katalyna_Rose



Series: A Journey of the Soul (Salshira) [5]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Bondage, F/M, Light BDSM, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 10:36:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19332841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katalyna_Rose/pseuds/Katalyna_Rose
Summary: Solas is a painter, and Salshira is his canvas for a sweet night filled with desire, release, and the holding back of secrets.





	Canvas

Salshira was in need. The words burned in her throat like bile and Solas could see it on her face. Her eyes were covered because he wanted her to feel as deeply as she could, and her ears were muffled, too, so that she had fewer senses to distract her from the painting on her skin. He painted her with soft strokes of the brush and hard lashes of the wooden handle, with oil to make the paint run just so as her muscles twitched beneath it. And all the while he spoke to her. She could hear his voice beneath the cotton in her ears, fainter than normal but still there. He told her that she was strong, that she was beautiful, that she was the best canvas he’d ever had, he told her every truth he could afford to say. And she shivered and trembled with sensation, with need.

Her knees had given out again and she hung prone from the rope that held her hands above her head. He put his paint palette aside for a moment to put his hands on her hips, to bring her back to her feet and hold her steady for a moment. She wobbled and fell again almost immediately after he released her, but she was gasping and straining toward him and she wasn’t ready for him to be finished yet.

The paint was cold as ice when it lashed across her skin and she gasped as he admired the way it pebbled in paint as warm as her heated flesh. “Lovely,” he murmured, and watched her tremble. Though that may have been as much from a droplet of cold paint dripping down across her hardened nipple as from what he said.

Her creamy skin was flushed, tan lines lost in the heat of the blood that moved within her. A line of faint freckles, normally invisible unless he was very close to her and looking for them, stood out starkly across her nose and cheekbones. Golden hair turned dark with sweat clung to her skin like a lover, curling around her neck and one shoulder like the hand of another caressing her as he dragged a new color across his painting. Candlelight clung to the droplets of sweat on her skin, wreathed her in golden light like a spirit of Wealth, but she trembled and strained like Desire.

A touch of crimson was needed, but not with the brush. He dabbed his thumb in the brilliant color and slowly, gently, swiped it across her bottom lip. Her hot breath stuttered across his hand, heavy with the weight of everything she was feeling as she strained for him, as the smooth, wet paint he pressed into her skin left that streak of color behind to compliment the dark flush of her lips and a callus on his thumb caught the tender flesh.

That sensation, his skin against hers in the midst of a masterwork of painting, was what broke her. A cry was wrenched from deep in her chest, a desperate mewling that lit his nerves on fire and sparked against his skin like lightning. She jerked against the bonds that held her, wrists secured together and hung from above, ankles tied to each other, and then she was still but for the soft and constant tremors that shivered through her.

He sighed, a slow and long exhale of purest satisfaction as he gazed upon his finished work. She was streaked with paint from clavicle to pelvis, drips of sweat and oil and color reaching lower, down her legs, in little puddles on the floor. It was a picture not on her skin, but of her skin, the canvas every bit as much a part of the beauty as what was on it. And truly she was perfect. He committed her to memory, wishing he could keep her like this for days, weeks, feeding her from his hand as his art was admired, a gallery of only one, as the People came to see that she was his perfect canvas. She was his glory, his shining work, the mural to put all others to shame. She was his partner, an essential part of the art that they created together, and he wanted to stand beside her as an envious crowd sighed over her beauty, as proud of his work, of hers, as he had every right to be.

But no, that was another time, another place, and it didn’t exist here. There would be no gallery, no showing, and he would have to take down his canvas soon. But he could admire her for a moment longer as he put down his palette and began to clean his brushes.

She lay there in her perfect state of ecstasy, a vessel he had filled with bliss, as he cleaned up his paints. He knew that she had not fallen asleep only by the way her ears twitched toward him, following his every movement even through the cotton that muffled the world. His hands found her once more, gliding gently up her unpainted sides as she hung there and waited.

“Solas,” she breathed, and the words were no longer bile in her throat but the softest silk. Waiting, needing. She was ready to say it.

But she wasn’t. It had been their promise, a rule never to be broken, a boundary never to be pushed, the one line he must never cross. Because no matter what she thought she was ready to say in this state of bliss where nothing else mattered, she would hate him, would hate herself, for the words that she wanted to say when she woke.

So he kissed her, gently, softly, just enough to make the words catch in her throat once more as the drying paint on her lip smeared onto his in a shared vow. It took a moment as the urge to release this final burden fought against his insistence and her better judgement, but at last she kissed him back and the words she couldn’t say were swallowed once more.

He took down his canvas from the wall on which he’d hung her and carefully, gently, began to return her to a woman instead of a work of art. Blindfold lifted, cotton removed, ropes carefully unwound. He massaged her arms and hands and shoulders as she lay on the floor and let him reshape her once more, this time back into herself instead of away. Groggy eyes blinked open and watched him peacefully as he worked, but always, always, behind those vibrant green depths were all the words she couldn’t say. But he couldn’t be upset about it, and not just because he’d agreed to it. But because she was watching the words he couldn’t say as they waited behind his eyes.

Better to have her now, and the weight of a secret behind their gazes as they looked at each other, than to throw it all away on if’s and maybe’s and uncertainty and pain. Better to love her now than lose her later.

“I want to see,” she whispered as he wet a cloth in a bowl of treated water to begin to remove the paint.

He smiled as a hand barely twitched in an effort to preserve the artwork he’d made of her. “I will show you,” he promised, and kissed her gently once more. “I will show you how beautiful you look when we find each other in the Fade tonight.”

That seemed to mollify her, and her protests faded to nothing. She took a deep, peaceful, tired breath and watched the secrets behind his eyes as he cleaned her up, wiping blank his canvas so that he could start all over another night.

Another night. There would be one, he was certain. Until the day when his secrets or hers finally burst from lips that couldn’t contain them any longer. He didn’t know why, but he was so sure, down to his very bones, that her secrets were as shattering as his. And in moments like these, with her trusting him, needing him, laying peacefully in his arms, he wanted nothing to do with secrets. Nothing at all.


End file.
